A recruitment consultant or the job boards
Compare the real cost of a recruitment consultant against posting the role yourself, and work out which roles are worth paying a placement fee for.
The role that has been open for six weeks
Either nothing is arriving or applications are arriving in bulk and none of them read the requirements. Both situations end at the same question. Do we pay a consultant a placement fee or do we work the job boards ourselves and accept that somebody internal loses several days to it.
The choice is usually framed as paid against free. It is not. Posting the role yourself transfers the cost from an invoice to your own calendar and senior hours are the most expensive thing a small business spends. The question is which of the two costs you would rather bear for this particular role.
What each option costs and what it leaves with you
A consultant fee excludes almost everything except sourcing and first-stage screening. You still run the interviews. You still make the decision and the offer. You usually still need a job board subscription for other roles. The fee is normally a percentage of annual cost to company with the percentage and the payment trigger stated in the agreement, and GST at 18% applies to it as a service. Replacement clauses sound reassuring and are narrowly worded so read what actually triggers them. How any of this is treated for tax and for contract purposes in your own case should be confirmed by a qualified professional.
Job boards exclude screening entirely. The subscription buys reach and nothing else. Every filter, every rejection message and every follow-up call is yours. That workload arrives in the first seventy-two hours after posting.
Which roles justify a fee and which do not
A consultant earns the fee on roles where the candidate is not looking. Senior hires, narrow technical skills, a confidential replacement, a new city where you have no network. Also when the cost of the seat staying empty is larger than the fee, which is easy to establish for a sales role carrying a target.
Do not pay a placement fee for high-volume junior roles. Freshers and entry-level operations and support staff apply to boards in quantity and the consultant is reselling you a search you could have run. Do not pay one for a role you can fill from your own employees' networks because a referral costs a bonus and arrives pre-vetted. And do not engage a consultant at all if your business cannot complete an interview process in a fortnight. Good candidates presented to a slow employer accept something else, the consultant stops prioritising you, and you have spent weeks reaching the same position with a damaged reputation in that consultant's network. Fix the decision speed before buying more candidates.
Doing either properly
With a consultant, brief in writing and brief once. The actual day-to-day work rather than the designation. The compensation band you will genuinely pay. The three things that disqualify a candidate immediately. Decide exclusivity deliberately. One consultant working exclusively usually works harder than three competing because the others are sending you whoever is quickest. Agree in writing how a candidate is claimed and for how long, since duplicate submissions are the most common source of fee disputes.
On the boards, the job title is a search term and not an internal designation. Write it as a candidate would type it. Publish the compensation band. Name the city and state plainly and say whether the role is on site. Add two screening questions that require a sentence rather than a tick. Then commit somebody to clearing the inbox daily for the first week because applicants who wait four days have already taken another interview.
What to measure and what will mislead you
Measure time from approval to accepted offer, and cost per hire with your own interview hours valued honestly alongside any fee. Then measure whether the person is still there and performing after six months. A cheap hire who leaves inside a quarter has cost more than the fee you avoided.
Application volume is the flattering number. A board post can generate hundreds of applications and tell you nothing about whether anyone qualified saw it. The count of CVs a consultant has sent is the same trap. Shortlist-to-interview conversion is the figure that distinguishes sourcing from forwarding.
The common mistake
The expensive error is not publishing the compensation band. It feels like preserving negotiating room. What it does is fill the funnel with people whose expectations are nowhere near yours, which is discovered at the offer stage after four rounds of senior interviews. Several weeks and a great deal of goodwill are spent to learn a number that could have been printed at the top.
The second error is paying a fee for a candidate you already had. Businesses without a simple record of who applied, when and through which route pay twice for the same person and have no basis to contest it. A dated list of every applicant and their source is unglamorous and settles the argument before it starts.
The hybrid most small businesses end up with
Post junior and generalist roles yourself with a disciplined daily review. Keep one consultant relationship for senior and specialist hires and use it rarely enough that you remain a client worth prioritising. Keep your own applicant records in both cases because the candidate you reject today is often the right hire two years from now.
This guide explains how something works. It is not legal, tax or financial advice, and rules change. Confirm anything regulatory with a qualified professional before you act on it.